Startup allows student-athletes to post profiles to attract attention of college coaches

Jan. 24, 2014

RecruitTalk CEO Rob Humphreys, left, and longtime college coach Scott Sanderson talk at the RecruitTalk office in Nashville. The startup, which connects high school athletes with college coaches looking to build their teams, recently hired Sanderson, a former coach for Lipscomb University. / Steven S. Harman / The Tennessean

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A former college basketball coach, Scott Sanderson now works with RecruitTalk. His mission is to better connect potential collegiate athletes with colleges while also helping young students understand key academic requirements. / File / The Tennessean

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RecruitTalk, founded last year by CEO Rob Humphreys, Chris Blanz and Jack Waddey, has raised more than $250,000 from investors to fund the startup. Its team includes five full-time and two part-time employees.

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Former Lipscomb University basketball coach Scott Sanderson regularly fields questions from parents about how they can get their child’s athletic story in front of recruiters.

At the same time, he knows about the difficulty of finding the right players from a coaching perspective.

So when executives with local startup RecruitTalk approached him last year about joining their company, which allows high school athletes to share their stories with college coaches, he said yes.

“We are trying to the best of our ability to help kids and help parents understand the recruiting process better,” Sanderson said. “There is definitely a need for it.”

Through RecruitTalk, led by CEO Rob Humphreys, students can create a profile that includes highlight videos, statistics, grade-point averages and social media links that track their progress in athletics and academics. Coaches can search among student profiles to discover talent and learn more about potential players, all at one site.

Top athletes in the highest profile sports, such as football and basketball, are actively sought-after and may have little difficulty getting their name out to college coaches, especially with increased coverage from digital media sites including Rivals.com, 247Sports and Scout.com. But there are millions of other high school athletes in other sports or in other divisions who want to compete in college but may need more help getting the attention of coaches.

“Those kids need to tell their story — how they are progressing; how they are getting bigger, faster, stronger; how they are keeping their grades up,” Humphreys said. “We are trying to provide a service for the other 99 percent.”

Coaches outside Division I programs often don’t have the time or resources to see as many kids as they would like to fill their team rosters. They stand to benefit from increased access to profiles of athletes.

The RecruitTalk team is quick to emphasize it is not guaranteeing college scholarships, but rather it is offering a way to share an athlete’s story that could build a relationship between a player and a college.

RecruitTalk is available for all men’s and women’s NCAA sports, and it is being used by athletes in 24 different sports — from basketball, soccer, football, baseball, all the way to water polo, bowling and riflery. Students can create a basic profile, which includes a one-page profile, a photo, a video and a set of statistics for free. For $15 a month, students can upgrade to a subscription that will allow them to post multiple videos and provide game-by-game updates, among other features. Once a profile is built, students and high school coaches can send those profiles to colleges.

While any student-athlete can create a profile, RecruitTalk is building its user base through high schools, offering packages to athletic departments and sharing the site with high school coaches and guidance counselors who can assist students in creating their profiles. While most of its outreach has been at private or charter schools, Humphreys said RecruitTalk plans to expand to public schools.

What's required

The site also serves to inform students about eligibility requirements and emphasize criteria that is important to coaches and often goes well beyond what happens on the field, court or in the pool.

For example, athletes often discover too late that they need a certain amount of core classes completed each year to be eligible, Sanderson said. RecruitTalkshares requirementsand sends athletes reminders about them as part of its paid subscription model.

“Unfortunately, too many of them figure out when they are in the 11th and 12th grade that academics are important, instead of figuring out when they are in ninth grade that there is a process to being recruited and (they) better have the grades from ninth grade on,” said Sanderson, who left Lipscomb last year.

“That’s where we are coming in, to help them understand the importance of academics, which I think will increase their GPAs and help them in school.”

Many young athletes also are unaware that what they post on social media sites can affect their recruitment potential. By including social media accounts in their RecruitTalk profile, the thinking is that students have a heightened awareness of what they post and will be more careful with what they say or share.

“Character is very important,” Sanderson said. “If they are going to represent me or my university, that’s really important, the kind of quality people we get.”